for he could now devote himself
wholly to the projection of a great work on Russia. Of the scale on
which this composition was conceived the reader is already aware. The
reader also knows how strange, how unsystematic, was the system employed
in it. Yet to say that Tientietnikov never awoke from his lethargy
would not be altogether true. On the contrary, when the post brought him
newspapers and reviews, and he saw in their printed pages, perhaps, the
well-known name of some former comrade who had succeeded in the great
field of Public Service, or had conferred upon science and the
world's work some notable contribution, he would succumb to secret and
suppressed grief, and involuntarily there would burst from his soul
an expression of aching, voiceless regret that he himself had done so
little. And at these times his existence would seem to him odious and
repellent; at these times there would uprise before him the memory of
his school days, and the figure of Alexander Petrovitch, as vivid as in
life. And, slowly welling, the tears would course over Tientietnikov's
cheeks.

What meant these repinings? Was there not disclosed in them the secret
of his galling spiritual pain--the fact that he had failed to order his
life aright, to confirm the lofty aims with which he had started his
course; the fact that, always poorly equipped with experience, he
had failed to attain the better and the higher state, and there to
strengthen himself for the overcoming of hindrances and obstacles; the
fact that, dissolving like overheated metal, his bounteous store of
superior instincts had failed to take the final tempering; the fact that
the tutor of his boyhood, a man in a thousand, had prematurely died, and
left to Tientietnikov no one who could restore to him the moral
strength shattered by vacillation and the will power weakened by want
of virility--no one, in short, who could cry hearteningly to his soul
"Forward!"--the word for which the Russian of every degree, of every
class, of every occupation, of every school of thought, is for ever
hungering.

Indeed, WHERE is the man who can cry aloud for any of us, in the Russian
tongue dear to our soul, the all-compelling command "Forward!"? Who is
there who, knowing the strength and the nature and the inmost depths of
the Russian genius, can by a single magic incantation divert our ideals
to the higher life? Were there such a man, with what tears, with what
affection, would not the gratef